open source marketer and community manager

Month: September 2007

Today I have decided the elective courses for my second year at MIP MBA. It wasn’t an easy decision, but in the end I decided to ditch the hard disciplines and focus on improving my soft skills. I picked Lean manufacturing and services and Change management and knowledge management. I was undecided wether to go for Mergers and acquisitions or Supply Chian Management Advanced but reading this and this made me decide to concentrate on organization and strategy.

I have a little knowledge of the concepts behind lean manufacturing applied to services and I really want to know more about it. The Lean group of MIP has developed experience on lean services, especially health management (in Italian), a field that has vast space for IT penetration and Free Software, too. It seems the ideal development for me 🙂

Yesterday the long battle supporting the EU Commission in the antitrust trial ended. Such activity was started by Peter Gerwinski and later carried out by others, including me. Yesterday a phase has closed.

Today I start a new one, but without FSFE. I have just sent the following message to FSFE board announcing my resignation. Thank you for your help and support: these have been wonderful years.

Dear FSFE Team and Free Software community,

I hearby resign from my position as Italian Chancellor and Fellowship Coordinator for the FSFE.

I have contributed to the growth of the organization since 2001, including the creation of projects such as the Fellowship and GNUvox.info, the fight to the swpat directive, the opposition to OOXML and many other successful activities.

So it is with a heavy heart that I must recognize the organization has taken a direction that I can no longer support, one which I feel will eventually make it irrelevant in the community, if not defunct.

In June 2007 I devised with other team members a constructive proposal to re-organize the foundation as a starting point for reforms. It fell on deaf ears. It has since become clear that all efforts would be made to ensure that my resignation was necessary.

I will continue to promote Free Software within other organizations and in other ways.

I wish to thank all the people who generously contributed time and expertise to the Italian chapter and the Fellowship.

The problem with Microsoft channel is that it’s a channel that (mainly) develops software on top of proprietary protocols and formats. Therefore I see the value growing only for Microsoft, if OSI approves these licenses. Just look at Moon/Silverlight deal between MS and Novell: who is safe using that *light? Only those that accept deals with MS like Novell did.

I’ll tell you what we need from MS, and that is not more licenses. We need them to stick to the requests from the EU Commission regarding interoperability. Only one week and we will find out about that too.

Besides, I don’t see the value in adding more licenses that mimic existing ones, like ASL, BSD and GPL, to the already long list of OSI approved licenses.

And while talking about Microsoft habits, here is Matt’s point of view:

there is good reason for criticism of Moonlight/Silverlight:

To the extent that it requires Microsoft patent approval to be effective (and it does, by Miguel’s own admission), it is shackled in its potential. Interoperability is to Microsoft what prostitution is to a pimp: a great source of control and income.